AOL quietly launched their Goodmail CertifiedEmail service this past week. WHAT? Yes folks, their plans are moving forward:

This week, ExactTarget released their 2005 Response Rate Study that summarized open, click-through and unsubscribe rates. Learn about my sweet spot send day logic before you start sending more emails on Friday:

Ezine-Tips reader Glen writes, "I'm not sure if you wrote an article about this...anyway can you offer me any advice or resources about the art of weaving in a story from your life into your email marketing messages? Here are my 8 tips to do just that:

How can you really figure out what the market wants you to write about next? Don't guess! I'll show you 7 quick ways you can poll the market (in most cases, without doing a single survey)...

Fee-based email newsletters on average do not have the same level of perceived economic value as print-based newsletters, yet ebooks can sell for 2-5 times the same price as a print book of the same exact content. Seems contradictory, no?

Recently in Tempe Arizona I was sitting next to Tom Kulzer, CEO of Aweber. He lives in the autoresponder & sequenced email service provider world and not the ezine publishing world (even though his clients also publish ezines with his service). Check out his argument for why the ezine model is not as cool as the sequenced autoresponder model:

More than a year ago, I shared how important it is to give your blog audience the ability to subscribe via email to your newest blog entry sent to them in either real-time or daily/weekly summary. This year, I'm encouraging you to take the NEXT step in this evolution and give your blog commentors the ability to subscribe via email to the comment thread they are leaving a comment on. Here's why and how:

One huge mistake that many ezine publishers do when sending HTML email newsletters is that they will test their design to their email client (software they use to check & send email) and wrongly assume the rest of the world uses the same email software. Today, you'll learn about Inline HTML vs. Internal/External CSS stylesheets for your ezine template:

A recent subject line research article by Return Path identified that "click-through rates (CTR) for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more." Wow, why is this so?

Having been in the email services industry for more than a decade -- it occurred to me that you might benefit from taking a peak at some of the leaders that I track in the "Email Universe". Here's my short list: